Assistance program
Promotion of the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access
$185.8 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities
- Assistance
- Project Grants
- CFDA number
- 45.149
- What it does
- Preservation and Access grants ensure the long-term and wide availability of primary resources in the humanities by funding projects that promote preserving and providing intellectual access to resources held in libraries, museums, archives, historical organizations, and other collections that are important for research, education, and public programming in the humanities. The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports the digitization and description of humanities collections to make their content widely accessible and the creation of reference resources to facilitate the use of cultural materials. The National Digital Newspaper Program supports a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers. The Cultural and Community Resilience program supports community-based efforts to mitigate climate change, safeguard cultural resources, and foster cultural resilience. Dynamic Language Infrastructure – Documenting Endangered Languages Senior Research Grants, a partnership between NEH and the National Science Foundation, supports the documentation of at-risk languages. Preservation Assistance Grants help small and mid-sized institutions improve their ability to preserve and care for their humanities collections. The Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections program supports environmentally sustainable preventive care measures that preserve collections, reduce energy consumption and costs, and strengthen resiliency to disasters. Preservation and Access Education and Training supports educational programs for professionals who preserve and provide access to humanities collections. The Research and Development program supports projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources.
- Who benefits
- U.S. nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, public and 501(c)(3) accredited institutions of higher education, state and local governmental agencies, and federally recognized Native American Tribal governments.
- Who applies
- Eligible applicants include U.S. nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, public and 501(c)(3) accredited institutions of higher education, state and local governmental agencies, and federally recognized Native American Tribal governments.
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments